Roller bearing is one of the most widely used elements in rotary machines. Condition monitoring of such elements is conceived as pattern recognition problem. Pattern recognition has two main phases: feature extraction and feature classification. Statistical features like minimum value, standard error and kurtosis, etc. are widely used as features in fault diagnostics. These features are extracted from vibration signals. A rule set is formed from the extracted features and input to a fuzzy classifier. The rule set necessary for building the fuzzy classifier is obtained largely by intuition and domain knowledge. This paper presents the use of decision tree to generate the rules automatically from the feature set. The vibration signal from a piezo-electric transducer is captured for the following conditions-good bearing, bearing with inner race fault, bearing with outer race fault, and inner and outer race fault. The statistical features are extracted and good features that discriminate the different fault conditions of the bearing are selected using decision tree. The rule set for fuzzy classifier is obtained once again by using the decision tree. A fuzzy classifier is built and tested with representative data. The results are found to be encouraging. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.